Blowback (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  I carried that thought with me down to the lake and onto the beach—and lost it when I saw the two people sitting with their heads together like a couple of conspirators, or a couple of lovers, in the shadows up near the trees. There was a flash of white as one of them moved and then a deep lazy rumble of laughter from the other one. Mrs. Jerrold. And Todd Cody.

  Well goddamn it, I thought, and veered up toward them. They could see me clearly enough, silhouetted against the lake, but neither of them moved as I approached. I told myself to take it easy, keep things light and affable, but there was a knot of anger in my chest; I slid my hands into my pockets to keep them from clenching.

  They were sitting on a flat outcropping of rock, bare shoulders touching, and Mrs. Jerrold had her legs stretched out in front of her and her arms folded under her breasts so that they bunched up like a couple of half-peeled melons inside the white halter top of her bikini. Cody was in that skintight bathing suit of his, a towel draped around his neck. His expression was insolent, and the smile on his mouth had a fox-in-the-henhouse leer to it.

  Mrs. Jerrold's smile was more tentative. “The water's lovely,” she said. “We've just been in.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes. God, it's muggy, isn't it.”

  “Too muggy for anything but swimming.”

  She nodded, but Cody took it the way I meant it and let me hear his snotty laugh. “That's not necessarily so,” he said. “Look at that moon, that lake—it's a perfect night for making love.”

  “You're a romantic, Todd,” she said.

  “Sure. One of the last romantics in a world of cynical pragmatists.”

  I said nothing; I did not trust myself to say anything just then.

  Mrs. Jerrold shifted slightly on the rock. “Todd's invited me to his cabin for gin and tonic,” she said to me. “Why don't you join us after you've had your swim?”

  “He doesn't look like the gin-and-tonic type,” Cody said, and he was mocking me. He was young enough to be my son, and he was sitting there mocking me with another man's wife.

  I said tightly, holding onto my temper, “No, I'm not the gin-and-tonic type. I'm the beer-and-pretzels type. And I'm not a romantic, I'm a cynical pragmatist. Thanks anyway, Mrs. Jerrold.”

  “Angela—please?”

  “Thanks anyway, Mrs. Jerrold,” I said. Then, pointedly, “How's your husband doing tonight?”

  “Oh, well, he's … sleeping.”

  “That's probably a good idea, don't you think? I understand you're leaving tomorrow; you've got a long drive ahead of you.”

  “That's true. But it's so hot…”

  “Gin only makes you hotter,” I said.

  Cody had stopped smiling; he got up on his feet and narrowed his eyes at me. “If Angela wants a gin and tonic to cool off, man, that's her business.”

  “It might be her husband's too,” I said. “He's the jealous type, or haven't you noticed?”

  “What the hell are you, her father?”

  “Stop it, Todd.” She sighed softly and stood up. “Ray can be awfully jealous, you know, and it is getting late. I'd better get back.”

  “Hell, Angela—”

  She patted his arm. “It was a nice swim, wasn't it?” she said. “Good night.” Then she gave me a thin, pouty look, but not the good night, and left the two of us alone.

  Cody took a step closer to me and shoved his jaw out belligerently. “I don't like people sticking their noses in my life, man,” he said.

  “That's too bad, man.”

  “Maybe you're jealous yourself, huh? You'd like to make it with her but you haven't got the tools, so you screw it up for somebody who has.”

  I brought my hands out of my pockets. “Listen, I've had about all of your mouth I can stand. Suppose you button it the hell up.”

  “I don't have to take crap like that from you.”

  “All right,” I said, “don't take it.”

  But he was not going to get into anything with me, any more than he had wanted to get into anything with Jerrold yesterday. He was all mouth, the kind of guy who goes through life blowing in the wind and then backing away when the blowing threatens to push somebody over on him.

  He pulled his lip into a sneer and said, “Another big macho,” and then pivoted away from me. After half a dozen steps I heard him mutter, “Fat old bastard.” He said it louder than he'd intended and he threw a quick, half-furtive look over his shoulder to see if I had heard. I stayed where I was, silent. He lifted the towel from around his neck, walking in a slow swagger, and flicked it back toward me in what was probably supposed to be a gesture of contempt.

  I stood there seething. Fat old bastard, I thought. Fat. Old. Bastard. I looked down at myself, at the way my stomach bulged over the waistband of my trunks, at the gray snarls of hair that grew on the bulge. Fat old bastard.

  Well all right, I thought then, savagely. I threw my own towel down and took off my shirt and went to the lake and waded out a few steps and dove in. It was plenty cold, cold enough to leave me gasping when I surfaced, but I was not going to let that affect me; I splashed around until I got used to it and finally began swimming in a hard steady crawl—fifty yards out and back, sixty yards and eighty and a hundred. When the complaint in my lungs became too severe, and my legs and arms started to stiffen up, I rolled over and floated on my back and stared up at the curved slice of the moon, resting.

  I was still angry.

  But not so much at Cody, now, as at Angela Jerrold. What made a woman like that tick? The feeling of power? The need for constant attention? Sex itself? Or was it simply that she was a man-hater—string them along and then sit back and watch them emasculate themselves over her? Whatever it was, she seemed to be the kind who can keep on getting away with it, who foment disaster wittingly or unwittingly and walk away from it untouched.

  Well, there was nothing I could do about it. You can't change human nature and you can't live other people's lives; all you can do is turn your back on it at a distance, worry about your own problems. Clichés, every one—but a cliché is really nothing more than a statement of well-known fact. Right? Right, you fat old bastard?

  I rolled over again and swam a while longer, but the anger still would not go away, nor the feeling of uneasiness; the only thing that went away was the last of my strength. I paddled in and rubbed myself down with the towel, and wondered if I was tired enough to sleep now, and knew that I wasn't. I sat down on the outcropping of rock and listened to the crickets and swatted mosquitoes.

  And wanted a cigarette for the first time since last night. Badly.

  Just hang in there…

  Despite the heat, I began to feel a little chilled from the iciness of the lake water. Maybe Harry wants to play a few hands of gin rummy, I thought, and got up again and went up the path through the trees. The porch light on the Jerrolds' cabin was out now and the radio was silent. Small favors. I padded on among the dapples of moonlight and shadow.

  Fifty yards from Cabin Five, I heard the sharp slap of a screen door closing. It came from Bascomb's cabin, and I thought: So he finally got back—and did not think anything else about it until I came out in front of the place. Then I saw that it was still dark, although the door behind the screen was now standing partially open; the area was wrapped in stillness. I stopped as I had on the way down, frowning, and stood looking over there.

  When a man comes back to his cabin, I thought, he turns on a light somewhere, he doesn't just rattle around in the dark or jump straight into bed. So why didn't Bascomb put a light on?

  Maybe he hadn't come back at all, maybe he had been inside there all along and decided to go out. But then, why hadn't I seen him or at least heard him on the path? Because he went the other way, deeper into the woods? There was no path back there and the growth was pretty thick for late-night strolling.

  I waited another thirty seconds. Silence, darkness. Come on, I told myself, what the hell difference does it make where Bascomb is and what he's doing? He's no
t with Mrs. Jerrold, that's all that concerns you.

  But the edginess had sharpened now inside me, and the stillness seemed unnaturally acute—and I stopped fighting my impulses and walked slowly across the open ground between the path and the cabin. I climbed up onto the porch, not trying to be quiet about it, and put my face close to the screen. Blackness, the vague shapes of furniture; there was nothing else to see.

  “Bascomb?” I called softly.

  No answer.

  I rapped on the wall beside the door, but that got me nothing either. A faint prickling cold settled between my shoulder blades. I reached out compulsively and tugged the screen door open, pushed the inner door wide with the tips of my fingers. Hot, stale air stirred sluggishly against my face, thick with the smell of dust.

  “Bascomb?”

  Only the dull echo of my own voice.

  I slid my left hand around the jamb and along the wall until I located the light switch. Flipped it up and blinked against the sudden pale glare from the ceiling bulb. I realized I had been holding my breath and let it out audibly as I scanned the room, the bath alcove beyond the open door at the far end.

  Empty.

  That stagnant air was the kind that accumulated when a place was shut up during the summer for a day or more. But Bascomb could not have closed himself in here all that time, half-suffocating, because Harry and the sheriff's deputy had not found him in this morning. Then where had he been and where was he now?

  And who had been in here a few minutes ago?

  I looked over at the bed. It was rumpled, blankets sleep-kicked into a tangle at the foot On the table was a plate with two pieces of bologna curled up and dried out like dead insects, and a glass half-filled with what looked to be flat beer. A pair of corduroy trousers was draped across the back of one chair, and on another, near the bed, was an open suitcase that contained several items of neatly folded clothing. Against the left-hand wall were two small oil paintings, one of them mounted on an easel, both of them done in bright bold colors that depicted Eden Lake at dawn and in the late afternoon. And on the floor next to the easel, lying with its pages fanned out at opposing angles like a collapsed tent, was Bascomb's sketchpad.

  The sketchpad was the only thing out of place. It should not have been on the floor and it should not have been so carelessly positioned. Artists don't treat their work that way, and there was nothing in the immediate area off which it could have fallen by accident. It looked as if it had been thrown there.

  I hesitated, struggling with myself because I wanted to go in and have a look at that pad, but if I did it I would be trespassing and invading privacy. Just another pulp detective, despite all my mental ramblings earlier. Well, maybe that's just what I was, and Erika had nailed it square on the head that day four years ago. A derivative chunk of pulp.

  I stepped inside and let the screen close softly behind me.

  Feeling furtive, I crossed to the easel and bent and hauled up the pad. Some of the pages were creased and some of them had smudge marks where the charcoal had been touched by heedless fingers. And one of them had been torn out, but hurriedly or angrily because a three-inch triangle remained at the upper left corner. Part of a sketch was visible on the triangle. When I held it up to the light I could make out the tops of trees and what might have been part of a hill and something else in the lower angle that looked like the peak of a roof.

  There was not enough there to tell me much, and yet just that little bit had a vaguely familiar aspect. I stared at it, concentrating, searching my memory. No good. Vaguely familiar, nothing more.

  If Bascomb wasn't the one who tore out the sketch, I thought, that leaves the somebody else who was in here a little while ago. But why? What possible significance could a sketch have that would lead someone to steal it or destroy it?

  A lot of other questions and speculations began to crowd the back of my mind, all of them dark and ominous. I tore off the triangle, folded it carefully and tucked it into my shirt pocket; then I went over and put the pad on the table and had another standing look around the cabin. Everything seemed normal and in its place; no sign of a search or anything else intimidating. All right. I pivoted abruptly and moved to the screen door, pulled it open and took a step across the threshold.

  Something made a rustling sound in the trees beyond the east wall.

  I froze for a moment, half in and half out of the doorway, the hairs rising along the back of my scalp. Silence, heavy and pregnant. I stepped out all the way and eased the screen shut and stood tensed on the porch, listening.

  Almost immediately another sound came, closer this time, a sound that might have been footsteps sliding on dry pine needles.

  My reaction then was instinctive: I ran down the stairs and straight ahead for a dozen steps, turning my body, looking over at the east corner. That put me fully into pale silver starlight, unshad-owed and exposed, but it also surrounded me with open space and gave me room to maneuver. I changed direction and went diagonally toward the corner, running in a half-crouch now, hands out away from my body.

  There was a dark shape hunched in the shadows beyond it, a long thick object upraised in one hand.

  I could not see who it was, or even if it was a man or a woman. I opened my mouth to yell, but I did not get anything out; the figure had seen me coming, and it wheeled around and dropped the long thick object and plunged away to the rear.

  By the time I got to the front corner and swung around, the figure was just disappearing into the trees again; I could hear it crashing and stumbling through the undergrowth. I ran along the side of the cabin, slowed, and finally came to a halt near the back—leaned against the wall there. No point in my going into those woods; I was not about to find anybody in all that vegetation and darkness, and I would be running the risk of an ambush if I tried it.

  The sounds of flight diminished and the silence resettled again, still heavy and charged with tension. I turned and came back to the front, watching my flank, and located the thing the figure had dropped. Three feet of dead tree limb, as big around as my forearm. Jesus Christ. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands, and thought of what it could do to a man's head. Then I thought: Suppose it had been a gun, a rifle? He could have drawn a bead and shot me dead in all mat starlight.

  Some detective—some pulp detective.

  My breath was raspy in my throat, and the inside of my mouth was dry; I worked saliva through the dryness, went out again into the open space and over to the path. The shadows there seemed now to have taken on a malevolent cast, like nocturnal creatures crouched and waiting. Imagination. The incident, whatever its meaning, was finished.

  But when I started slowly back toward the lake, I carried the tree limb with me, poised across my body, just in case.

  Thirteen

  Nothing else happened; I made it through the woods and along the lakefront to Harry's cabin without seeing or hearing anybody. I put the limb down against the porch steps and went up, and he was sitting inside with his feet propped on a stool, reading a fish-and-game magazine. He looked up when I knocked, gestured for me to come in.

  “How goes it, buddy?” he asked.

  “Pretty damned lousy,” I said.

  His forehead wrinkled and he sat up. “Something happen?”

  “Yeah, but I don't know what it means.” I sat down on the second of the Naugahyde chairs. “When was the last time you saw Walt Bascomb?”

  “Bascomb? Hell, I don't know. Why?”

  “You see him today at any time?”

  “If I did, I don't remember it.”

  “Well, he's not in his cabin now and the way it looks, he hasn't been there since yesterday. But his car hasn't been moved.”

  “Maybe he went somewhere with somebody…”

  “Sure, maybe. But why hasn't he been back in better than a day? Why are all his belongings still at his cabin? Same questions if he went off by himself on foot.”

  Harry ran a hand through his hair. “Listen, how come all this sudde
n interest in Bascomb? I don't see what you're leading into.”

  “This, for one thing,” I said, and fished the torn corner of the sketch out of my pocket and handed it over to him. “Can you tell what it depicts?”

  He studied it for a moment and then shook his head. “No, there's not much of it here.”

  “It looks vaguely familiar to me.”

  “I suppose so, yeah. Where'd you get it?”

  “Off Bascomb's sketchpad. Somebody—probably not Bascomb—tore the sketch out, but they overlooked this much of it.”

  “Why would anybody do a thing like that?”

  “I don't know.”

  “How'd you happen across it?”

  “That's the thing that happened,” I said.

  When I finished telling him about the incident, he looked grimly confused. “It doesn't make any sense,” he said. “You don't have any idea who it was you saw?”

  “No. It was too dark, and it all came down pretty fast.”

  “You really think he'd have come after you with that limb?”

  “I can't be sure of that either. He ran off damned quick when I started after him.”

  “It doesn't make any sense,” he said again.

  “Remote as it might seem,” I said slowly, “I can think of one possibility. And you're not going to like it any more than I do.”

  “What possibility?”

  “That Bascomb's disappearance and the missing sketch tie in somehow with Terzian's murder last night.”

  He stared at me. “You can't be serious…”

  “I'm serious, all right.”

  “Are you saying Bascomb killed Terzian?”

  “I'm not saying anything, I'm only speculating. But that's a workable theory; it would explain his disappearance, and what happened to the stolen Oriental carpet.”

  “How could he have disappeared with the carpet if his car is still here? And where does the sketch come in?”